We’ve been very busy at The MathsZone. Feedback from schools suggested they really love our gifted and talented courses Illuminate and Wondermaths, but they already have some of the materials that come with them. So, we’ve done a major re-design. Still the same fantastic courses for your gifted and talented students at key stage 2 (Wondermaths) or key stage 3 (Illuminate), but now in a neat plastic storage box, which will go on your book shelves. Each one has a comprehensive teacher guide detailing the structure and purpose of all of the sessions, with commentary and solutions (where appropriate!). For the students we have organised the materials into a beautiful student workbook. Now your students can keep all of their work in a really attractive book which they keep at the end of the course. Game cards, dice and counters are included for the activities.
There are fewer puzzles directly referenced in the course, so the price is lower, but of course you can buy all of the puzzles separately to extend the activities. Illuminate comes with a CD Rom with all of the course materials and additional materials for projection. Wondermaths has an associated web site with the materials available. When you are ready to run the course for a second time, you can get extra sets of 10 copies of the workbooks. The key objective for the teacher is to get up and running with the minimum of fuss, so you can focus on supporting your students explore their mathematics.
The aim of both course is to give students the opportunity to explore mathematics. Wondermaths has games, to compare strategies, puzzles to develop sustained thinking and investigational maths top explore maths language and move towards explanation and proof. Illuminate aims to develop the ideas of pure mathematics for those who are limited by the algorithmic nature of school exam courses. Students will develop and compare proofs, while exploring the nature of proof itself. Their is a comprehensive section on group theory, fully accessible to ordinary school students. Games strategies are developed and compared and the course ends with a project in fractal geometry. These are really course in the mathematics that mathematicians would recognise.